


endure

by the_most_beautiful_broom



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, F/M, Zombies, i'll think of other tags i'm sure, kind of modern AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-06-27 12:41:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15685653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_most_beautiful_broom/pseuds/the_most_beautiful_broom
Summary: when the reaper virus took everything raven cared about, she retreated to the mountains, fighting off reapers, poachers and any reminder of the losses she's sustained. but when a bounty hunter shows up at her cabin, then a hit team, raven finds that she's not quite through with the life she left behind.





	1. Chapter 1

Nobody thought much of the reaper virus when it first broke out.

It was like West Nile again, or something, and people kind of figured they’d be okay as long as nobody coughed in their direction.

Then Passenger 93 started convulsing on a flight from DFW to La Guardia. An air marshal put the man out of his misery, but the flight had to land eventually and Manhattan fell in 48 hours, hospitals swarming and streets trashed, as panic spread.

And spread.

To Boston, to Philadelphia, to Chicago. It took longer to make its way out to west, but San Francisco fell, then Portland, then Seattle.

Quarantines weren’t effective, and there was no antidote. A third of the US was wiped out within two months. Borders shut down entirely and the rest of  the world held their breath and hoped for the best. Well, for their best. America no longer had that option.

They didn’t have many options, just the one: endure.

Raven had been out in Colorado, on enforced medical leave in a government-issued vacation home. She’d been fighting with NASA to let her come back—it was her leg that was irreparable, not her mind— when the news broke.

“Spend some time in the mountains, Reyes,” Sinclair had said, resigned. “Clear your head. We’ll be here when you’re ready to help from the control side of things, okay?”

Of course, that had been a lie.

Sinclair wasn’t there.

Houston wasn’t even there.

From what Raven could gather, most of the government had gone radio silent. She didn’t have many friends, and even less family, which made keeping tabs pretty easy.

Luna had pulled someone onto her boat; she hadn’t heard about the outbreak yet, and by the time harbor patrol found the boat, they were both dead. Wells had been donating blood, and someone hadn’t cleaned the syringe thoroughly enough. Jackson and Clarke had been on the front lines, treating victims; it’d only been a matter of time. Lincoln and Bellamy went down somewhere in one of the Carolinas, trying to find Octavia. Jasper wasn’t killed by the virus, but by rioters in downtown Los Angeles. Monty and Harper had been coming back from their honeymoon; their plane unaccounted for. Murphy and Emori had made it longer than most anybody else, in some caves out in Nevada. The problem with caves is there’s only one way out.

After finding so many answers that she didn’t want, Raven couldn’t bring herself to check on the ones she wasn’t sure about. Blind hope, no matter how unlikely, was better than the undeniable finality of death.

So she went offline too.

If anyone was out there looking for her, she’d rather they stay safe, wherever they were, than risk coming to find her.

The first time reapers had come, she’d been terrified.

Everything she’d seen on tv had shown warriors like poetry, dodging and slashing, and she just didn’t have that agility, not anymore.

Everything burns, though.  

So she swallowed her fear, strapped it to the case of gasoline she threw at the reapers, ignited it with the lighter she arced after it. Covered it like she covered the stench with cinnamon and cloves on the stovetop.

After that, she wasn’t afraid.

After that, it was a matter of incineration with the least effort.

It took two years, a couple failed turbines and a close scare with the electrolysis lab she’d set up in the shed, but Raven figured it out. She’d rewired some cattle fences to the perimeter of her property—it was hers now, sorry Uncle Sam—and that deterred most reapers. The ones who kept going were greeted with trip wires that opened a valve and liquid hydrogen spat  down; a wall of blue fire would rise once a pull on a secondary wire lit a match. Raven had a flame thrower she’d made from a leaf blower, just in case, and a cattle prod she’d tricked out, but nothing got close enough for her to make use of them.

A girl up around the Wyoming border had a tidy network of rations circulating. Raven had gotten the radios working on her 18-wheelers, and Niylah owed her. When a truck broke down, Raven fixed it; when Raven ran out of canned goods, Niylah fixed it.

Raven’s mountain was lonely, but there was nothing like coming off of it to realize how ideal it was. Down off the mountain, everything was gray, stripped, sparse. Raven never stayed long, retreating as soon as she could to the reclusivity of her cabin. She knew she was something of a local legend, the woman who lived in the reaper-infested woods, and kept the rest of the west running with her radios and wrenches. But on her mountain, the air was clear.  The morning fog always took with it the carnage of the night before, and the damp foliage of the wilderness reclaimed the carbon corpses. It was silent, but it was serene.

She could hear each car as they took the one-lane highway through the valley below her. When she was bored, she’d listen to the engines, then check out the window to see if they matched the car. She wasn’t often wrong. Cars sounded different at this altitude, and she didn’t give a passing motorcycle much thought.

Which was why the snap of a twig outside her cabin caused her heart to skip a beat.

She was upstairs, washing her laundry in her bathtub; nothing fancy just a healthy glob of dish soap and her dirty tank tops, stirred with the blunt end of a broom until the suds were soiled. At first, she thought she’d imagined the snap, but then another followed it.

Couldn’t be reapers.

They didn’t move this slowly or this silently, which meant an intruder.

She had her fair share of those too.

People who’d heard one too many stories, or who thought she took advantage of Niylah and made off with too many cans of food. Either way, Raven had gotten good at moving around her leg, and she flicked her hands over her tub, wiping them on the back of her jeans. Sure they were dry enough, she reached for the rifle near the door, her feet sliding silently across the wooden floor of the cabin. The door opened without a sound, and she knew where to step on the boards to keep them from alerting her intruder.

The balcony was above and to the left of the porch; she had the rifle trained on him and cocked before he registered the sound and turned.

Hmm.

Raven didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t him.

Broad shoulders, bright eyes, a leather jacket that wrinkled when he lifted his arms. And he was smiling.

“Who are you?” she asked, no preamble.

“You’re Raven Reyes?”

He had a nice voice, a hint of an accent underneath the smooth timbre of it.

“Not what I asked,” Raven said.

But she lowered the gun. If he were here to loot her, he’d have taken a shot of his own already. She studied him.

There were circles under his eyes, dark with exhaustion, and he was blinking slowly. Despite his good humor, he had a look about him like he’d been on the road for longer than he’d been off it. It was a heavy sort of nonchalance, and his gaze held the energy of a wind whipping over a barren desert.

Still, her face didn’t soften. “How’d you get past my trip wires?”

The man mimed stepping over them and she resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

“Okay,” she tried again, “how about _why_ did you get past my trip wires?”

“Wanted to meet the person who set them.”

“Hmm. Well, here she is.”

“Here you are,” he said simply, and Raven tried not to read into the appreciation in his eyes. She cleared her throat.

“Um, the nearest reaper-free zone is about 115 miles down that highway. You should get back on your bike if you want to make that before dark.”

He looked surprised at that, looking over his shoulder, presumably to where he’d hidden his motorcycle in the woods. “How’d you know about my bike?”

Raven snorted. “It’s a twin Cam 88B, yeah? On your Harley? She’s a pretty distinctive motor.”

The man whistled. “They weren’t kidding,” he muttered, and she knew he meant the people at Niylah’s outpost, the people who spun her stories for her.

Maybe that’s why he’d come up this way, to see if the stories were true. Check a line off his road trip bucket list, on his way towards a reaper-free zone.

“They rarely do, these days,” she said evenly, surprised at herself. She should be kicking him off, demanding her give her back her silence. Not offering him rapport.  

“What if I didn’t go?“  
He asked it without looking at her, just over the forest. At the way the sun broke over the tops of the trees, the crests of the mountains golden in the light. Reveling in the crisp cleanliness of the air, the bit in it, the sounds of birds and wind and silence.  

“Why would you want to stay?” Raven asked, curious, despite her better judgment.

The man turned back to her, squinting slightly. He regarded her for a long moment, staring up at her like she was a part of the serenity. His eyes drifted from her face to down to her brace, to the hand on the rifle, to the water splashes on her tank. Then he shook his head and lifted a shoulder easily in a shrug. “I’ve been on the road for a while; it’d be nice to lay low for a couple of days. I could help you—”

And, just like that, the haze in her mind from his soothing voice and kind eyes dissipated.

“I don’t,” Raven interrupted, eyes flashing, “need help. Not from you, not from anybody.”

The man shook his head. “I didn’t mean—”

“115 miles,” Raven said, emphatically. “Sundown is in two hours; you’d better get moving.”

They stared at each other then, she looking down from the balcony, stern, and he looking as though he should apologize, but not sure if she’d let him.

The standoff was interrupted by a zapping sound in the distance, and a warbled thud.

The man started, looking out into the woods, and Raven repressed a sigh. Reapers at the cattle wire. It wasn’t anything new, but it meant she couldn’t send her visitor away in good faith. She rested the rifle over her shoulder and cocked her head towards the shed.

“Wherever you stashed that bike,” she said, “I’d move it now. Reapers don’t make it too far up the property, but they like something shiny. You can stash it in the shed but seriously—seriously—don’t bump any of the tables. You can stay until the buzzing stops.”

She ducked back inside before he could give a response.

To his credit, he didn't rev up the engine. She didn’t think he would, but she listened for it all the same. She heard the shed doors creaking open, and the crunch of leaves under the heavy wheels of his Harley, and then the uncertain footsteps on the porch again.

She was upstairs, wringing out the tank tops and stretching them over a drying rack and she could hear him pacing.

Odd.

That he’d come up to her house, past the trip wires and fences and everything, but now show hesitancy.

“The door’s open,” she called, unplugging the drain. Gray water swirled down the pipes and Raven waited until the suds were almost all gone before she turned on the spigot and rinsed the tub out again and headed downstairs.

If she had to guess, she’d say he hadn’t moved an inch from letting himself in. He was just inside the door, shifting between his feet. He seemed taller than he had when she was upstairs. Not hulking, but he filled her foyer, and is magnified his uncertainty.

“That’s some distillery you have out there,” he said, eventually.

Raven smirked; she knew that he knew she was doing more than turning potatoes into hard liquor with her electrolysis lab. “Since nothing went boom,” she said, turning sideways, and gesturing past her into the kitchen, “I assume you didn’t touch anything. Don’t track mud into my cabin.”

The man kicked his boots off next to the mat by the door. “What’re you doing with the hydrogen?”

“Selling it to the highest bidder,” Raven said dryly. “Or incinerating reapers who feel like trespassing. Whichever comes first.”

He tripped over nothing, turning to look at her as he walked by. “That’s what the wire’s for?”

Raven shrugged. “I think blue burns prettier than yellow.”

The man whistled, and continued past her to the kitchen. “Glad I step lightly.”

Raven yanked on the string in the middle of the kitchen; the light bulb flickered on the ceiling. It wasn’t late enough in the afternoon to need the light of it yet, but she figured she might as well. She crossed over to the cabinets, grabbing a can of chilli and a box of cornbread mix.

“It’s hardly fine dining,” she said, not apologizing, but still giving the disclaimer, “but it’s not half bad.”

“It beats air sandwiches, so I’m game.”

He didn’t ask and she didn’t decline, but he moved in the kitchen next to her, helping her make the simple meal. It wasn’t quite camaraderie, just the practiced movements of people who’ve been living on the same canned and boxed fare for years.

“So,” the man cleared his throat, covering the cast iron skillet that held the cornbread, “you probably want to know what I’m actually doing here.”

Raven nodded, wiping her hands on a towel by the sink. “That’d be good, yeah. You could start with a name, too.”

“Oh, right,” he wiped a hand on his jeans, before turning and offering it to her. “Shaw.”

“Shaw what?” Raven asked, taking his hand. He had a firm grip, and she couldn’t tell if the warmth of his fingers was from the closeness of the stove or anything else.

“It’s what Shaw, actually,” he shrugged. “Surname.”

Raven nodded. It wasn’t any of her business which name he went by.

“Okay, Shaw, so—”

“Actually,” he interrupted her, and his eyes dropped, like he was surprised at himself. “Sorry. ‘Zeke’ is fine.”

“Given name?” she asked, with a quirked eyebrow.

“Not even,” he said, then let go of her hand.

Raven lived in isolation. She barbequed reapers every other day and she single-handedly resurrected the network that kept the West fed during this endemic. Fanciful, she was not.

But all the same, she felt the loss of his fingers over hers.

Raven stepped back from the stove, crossing the small kitchen to the table wedged against the corner. “Alright, so then why are you here?”

He followed her, settling on one of the chairs across from her. He took a deep breath, let it out on a sigh. “I was sent to find you.”

Raven’s breath caught.

It wasn't possible.

She didn’t have anyone. There wasn’t anybody left, nobody who would know her. She’d buried all her friends and family, mourned them from a distance, known they were tossed into nameless graves.

“No,” she shook her head, swallowing with effort, “There’s nobody left to look for me.”

She felt the weight of his gaze, heavy as if he couldn’t believe it, sad like he wouldn’t ever want to. Then he shifted, reaching into his back pocket, and pulled out a folded up piece of paper. It wasn’t paper; it was a photograph. Raven blinked at it, then up at Zeke.

“I don’t want that.”

“I think you do,” he said, his voice gentle.

“I really don’t,” she said, her voice the opposite.

Losing her friends, losing everyone had been hard enough the first time around. The last thing she needed was to get her hopes up, only for one more person to surrender to this virus.

“Listen,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady, “I’m sorry you came all this way, but—”

“Reyes, you there?”

A voice laced with static interrupted Raven, and both of their heads jerked to  the table by the entryway, where the military-grade coms system was set up. It was grossly underutilized; she kept it on one channel and only Niylah knew the frequency. If she got drunk enough, she’d flip through and pick up on the truckers’ dialog, just to eavesdrop. But nowadays, Raven mostly kept liquor around as a failsafe antiseptic.

She pushed away from the table, reaching for the radio.

“I’m here,” she said, pressing the receiver, her back to the room.

Niylah hissed something, a curse or a prayer, then a light laugh floated over the radio. “You had me nervous; a good mechanic is hard to find these days.”

Raven frowned. “Should I be worried for my job?”

“More like your life,” Niylah said, an underlying urgency lacing her transpondence.

Raven licked her lips. “Come again?”

“Apparently some people have been asking about you in town. Army types.”

Raven looked over her shoulder, down the corridor into the kitchen. Zeke was in front of the stove, balancing a hot lid on a towel and poking the cornbread with a knife. Maybe she'd read him wrong, but he didn't seem the sort to ask around. 

“Nothing I can’t handle,” she said into the radio.

The line was silent.

“I hope not,” Niylah said at length. “My people say they were plenty imposing.”

They?

So not just Zeke. He'd been sent to find her, but maybe he wasn't the only one. 

Raven chewed her bottom lip. “How many of them? And what were they asking?”

“Half a dozen. Nothing too incriminating, just...interested.”

She let go of her lip. “Any idea what they wanted?” she asked.

Niylah must’ve shaken her head because the line was quiet. “No idea. Be safe, okay?”

Raven almost smiled. Some days, allies were as close as you got to friends. “Always. Don’t send out job postings just yet.”

Niylah signed off and Raven leaded back against the table.

So.

She had reapers trying to climb her hill, a man hired to find her, and a small army after her. It was an awful lot to be coincidence, and it wasn’t enough to be fate, but it was enough to be exhausting.

She looked down at the radio in her hands.

She’d let Zeke stay the night.

Logistically it made sense: it’d be nice to have an extra pair of hands around in case Niylah’s sources were right, and she were ambushed.

That was it.

It had nothing to do with brown eyes, or the way he looked right at home in her kitchen, or the fact that her hand still felt cold since his touch.


	2. Chapter 2

There were a number of reasons why Raven didn’t sleep that night. 

The buzzing of the cattle wire was constant up until the early hours of the morning. At this point, she was familiar with the sound, even from the distance—the warning buzz, the snap and static of impact, the muffled thud of a body, or what used to be a body, landing in the damp soil. 

Then there was the weather; she felt the change of it in her hip. The days had been getting shorter but not much else signaled the end of summer, until now, when Raven felt the chill of autumn coming early. Technically, she knew it was an atmospheric change that she was reacting to, but it was more gratifying to say the seasons. 

Then there was Zeke. 

She didn’t know how much of the radio call he’d heard, but when she’d said he could stay the night—under the guise of eluding the reapers, of course—he’d nodded, and not given much else by way of a reaction. 

They’d eaten in silence, since every time he opened his mouth, it was to broach the topic of this rescue crusade he was apparently on. She didn’t know how to tell him she was thriving on the apocalypse, and he didn’t know how to take that. 

As soon as they were done, he’d automatically cleared the table, like it was habit, and set about washing the dishes. Raven didn’t feel the need to protest on behalf of propriety, since she was a reluctant hostess at best, and she had fed him. She waited until he was done, a line of soapy water on his tshirt from where he’d been leaning against the sink, to point him to the futon in the living room. The cabin had been intended to house four to five, so she had the space and blankets to spare. Zeke looked appreciative, but didn’t embarrass either of them with gratitude. 

Maybe it was the long journey, maybe it was the apathy that came with the world dying around you, but he slept soundly. She could hear him breathing throughout the night. 

Then there was Niylah’s warning. 

Perhaps Raven listened so intently to the zapping wire and steady breathing because her ears were straining for other sounds. The static of coms, heavy boots on her porch, the click before floodlights or a pounding on her door. But they never came. 

Raven’s eyes were burning as the sun came up, her ears echoing with imagined whispers, and she usually pushed herself out of bed with the morning sun, but today she gritted her teeth and pressed her elbows over her eyelids. Blocking out the light, blocking out the world; she needed to get at least a little sleep. Knowing the team hadn’t come and that Zeke would see himself out meant that she could finally try for some. 

When she woke up, she thought idly that maybe she needed more sleep, because the cabin smelled like pancakes. 

Raven frowned into her pillow, sliding a hand through her hair as she recovered her bearings. She never kept clocks around because she never kept time, but the shadows said she was sometime between morning and noon, which didn’t help her any in trying to figure out how much sleep she’d gotten. She yanked a tank top unceremoniously over her head and thumped down the stairs, halting at the landing. 

So it was pancakes. 

Rather, it was Zeke in her kitchen, making pancakes. 

Rather rather, it was Zeke, shirtless, in her kitchen, making pancakes. 

Which was a sight and a half.  

He had a couple of tattoos sprinkled across his upper body, black ink, simple, disguised by his movement or the swell his arms and chest. Some script under one of his ribs, something like wings on his forearm, a date in roman numerals along his collarbone. 

“You don’t have any maple syrup,” Zeke said, without turning from the stove. “But you do have honey and cinnamon, so we should be good.”

He was probably making breakfast as some sort of coercion tactic, like if he completed x amount of domestic tasks then she’d decide to go back with him. Or at least hear who’d sent him. Of course, neither was going to happen.

Raven leaned against the doorway, crossing her arms. “The cinnamon is for the ants.”

Zeke looked up, an amused frown on his face. “What?”

“They don’t like it,” Raven shrugged. “Put cinnamon on the window sill and they stay out.”

Zeke made a  _ you learn something new every day _ face, and went back to the stove. “Well, today it’s for pancakes.”

Raven wasn’t really a pancake person, and she still wasn’t convinced they weren’t a part of an ulterior scheme to change her mind, but it did smell good in the kitchen. She crossed behind Zeke to the sink at the other end of the room, leaning around him to grab the kettle from the stove. It was still early, and her mind was still waking up, that’s why she swayed a bit on her feet. And she didn’t mean to totter off balance, but she was used to being the only one around, so when she brushed against Zeke’s side, it really was an accident. Really. But her shoulder felt like it was burning from where she’d brushed against him, and he jumped pretty dramatically, so something told Raven he’d felt it too. 

“Sorry,” Raven mumbled, not sure what she was apologizing for. “Coffee?”

“Sure,” Zeke cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah, sure.”

She made the coffee. 

Then sat on the stool at the table, waiting, fingers curled around a warm mug. She was pretty sure Zeke was humming something, and Raven tracked along for a couple bars before she recognized the song. 

“Is that... _ I’m Yours _ ?”

Zeke stopped mid-line, and she could practically hear him trying to decide if he wanted to fight for it or not. 

“It might be,” he said, noncommittally. 

Raven hid a smile. “I don’t think I’ve heard that song since middle school.”

Zeke made a sound that could’ve been a laugh, then he fell silent, contemplative. “Middle school Raven...now there’s a thought. Robotics club before school? ASB at lunch?”

Whoever’s picture was in his pocket had sure done a thorough job of talking her up. 

“Something like that,” Raven said, thinking of the paper route she woke at dawn to ride, and sneaking through the lunch line a second time because there wouldn’t be food when she got home. 

Zeke looked like he might ask a follow up, and Raven didn’t know why he would want to know, but she wasn’t up for it. 

“And middle school Zeke?” she asked quickly. 

He looked over his shoulder casually, recognizing her diversion. But whatever was on her face was enough for him to turn back to the stove. “ROTC,” he said, flipping a final pancake onto the stack, and switching off the gas flame. “Before and after school. Young man’s got to learn discipline.”

Something in how he said it, just lightly enough to be hollow, made Raven watch him carefully as he walked across the small kitchen. 

So she wasn’t the only one who’d learned to be strong a little too young. 

Now that he’d said it, she recognized the wings on his arm, just symmetrical enough to be aircraft; it made sense now. 

“So it stuck,” she said, and it technically wasn’t a question, but he nodded all the same. 

“It stuck,” Zeke repeated. He set down the pile of steaming pancakes on the table, then retraced his steps for the honey and cinnamon. 

“Airforce?” she called after him.

Zeke shot her a look, setting down the honey emphatically. “Navy.”

Raven had never understood the weird rivalry between branches. 

Navy. But with the plane on his arm, that meant aircraft carriers and jet planes and catapults and steam in the middle of the sea, which she got the feeling suited Zeke pretty well. Raven didn’t know  _ why  _ she felt that, but she did. “Zero to 150 in, what, three seconds?”

“About 165,” Zeke sat down in one of the stools, something like pride on his voice, “and it’s in two seconds.”

They ate in silence, but it was a nervous kind of silence. Not that they were anxious, but that they were too comfortable, like they didn’t want to acknowledge all the things they weren’t saying. Like how Raven could never make herself eat a full meal, but she’d eaten two with Zeke in the past twelve hours. Like how he was watching her carefully, when he thought she wouldn’t notice, an unreadable expression on his face. 

Back when Raven’s friends were more than memories, Clarke had scoffed at the idea of soulmates, but still insisted that, every now and then, something in you recognizes something in someone else. Raven hadn’t ever had that; it’s hard to recognize someone else’s soul when you’re busy crouching behind carefully constructed walls. She was good at walls. And she was happy with the people she’d let behind them, people who deserved it, deserved her. But it hurt something awful when they were all taken away. 

Raven wasn’t sure with the connection between her thoughts meant. 

That Zeke was someone she recognized? That she should keep her walls, reinforce them? That she was handling sleep deprivation worse these days, and she really shouldn’t have kept herself up all night? 

Zeke cleared his throat, setting down his cutlery on the plate; Raven could tell he was ready to try again. 

Right. 

Because he’d shown up to retrieve her, and no matter what she’d felt between then and now, she wasn’t going with him. She couldn’t know who was still alive and who cared about her. 

“I told you,” she said quietly, “I don’t want to hear it.”

Zeke was still for a moment. 

“Okay, so humor me here,” he said at length, “Why do you help Niylah?”

Raven didn’t remember ever saying her name, but she wasn’t surprised that Zeke knew it anyways. 

“I need food and she needs a mechanic.”

Zeke nodded, considering. “And it has nothing to do with the thousands of people you’re helping her feed?”

“There aren’t thousands of people left,” Raven sighed. 

“That’s not a denial.”

“I guess it isn’t,” Raven stood, carrying her dishes over to the sink. “So?”

“So you’re not the careless lone wolf you want me to think you are.”

She set the dishes in the basin, not turning around. “So?” she asked again, her voice quieter this time. 

“So,” Zeke repeated, and there was the scraping of his chair across the floor of the kitchen as he pushed it back to turn to look at her. “You don’t have to be.”

Raven gripped the edge of the sink; he couldn’t have meant that how it sounded. 

“I mean,” he said hurriedly, and she got the feeling he’d just played his words back in his head, “Someone’s out there looking for you.”

“And they’ll keep looking.”

Raven turned from the sink, leaning against it, her chin rising. Zeke’s expression was a mixture of regret and pity, neither of which were emotions she liked to read on someone’s face. 

“Raven—” he began, but she shook her head. 

“I’m sorry you came all this way for nothing, but that’s what this has to be.”

“What, nothing?”

“Nothing,” she said shortly. 

“I don’t understand—”

“I’ve lost too much to lose anyone again.”

The words seemed to rip out of her and they hung in the silence in the kitchen. She sighed, looking away. If she’d read pity in his eyes before, she didn’t want to look back now.  

“And that’s not your fault,” she said quietly, “because I know you’re just doing your job, but once you tell me that someone is okay and looking for me, that’s someone the reapers can take away.”

When he spoke again, his voice was lower, rougher. “You think you’re the only one this virus has robbed?”

Raven ran a hand through her hair, still refusing to lift her gaze from the floorboards. “I know I’m not.”

Zeke made a sound like a huff or a hum. “But it’s okay for you to play recluse up here?”

Raven’s eyes snapped up, angry. “I’m not—”

“You are. You don’t get to decide who cares about you, Raven, or why.”

And it was back again, all the things they weren’t saying, and if Raven thought she’d imagined the fire on her shoulder from his chest or the recognition in his eyes, his words were enough to tell her she wasn’t alone. 

Which wasn’t fair. 

Because alone was what kept her alive, which kept Niylah and co. alive, which kept the west alive. She didn’t have time for Zeke, or whoever he was here on behalf of. 

Raven pursed her lips and pushed away from the sink. She paused at the doorway, every part of her wanting to turn around, but her mind tightened its grip on her heart, whispering that she had to protect herself. 

“The reapers stopped trying the perimeter sometime around dawn,” she said, her voice monotone, “you shouldn’t have a problem getting down to Colorado Springs.”

She went back upstairs. 

Disassembled the flame thrower, laid the parts out on the floor, polished them furiously with an old dish towel. Scrubbed harder when her leg protested from the lack of the support on the floor, gritting her teeth and welcoming the burn in her wrists over the ache in her leg. 

Pretended not to hear the scraping of the chair across the floor downstairs  

The fading footfall across the kitchen. 

The quiet open and shut of the door, the creaking of the shed. 

The revving of a  Cam 88B engine down at the bottom of her mountain. 

Then the silence.

She set her jaw and studied the parts before her, clean and hard and onyx. 

She nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard a hesitant step on her porch again; tried not to overthink why her first thought was relief. She was stronger alone, faster alone, safer alone. Better alone.

The door creaked open, and then there were footsteps on the landing.   

“I’m not kidding, Zeke,” she called. “I’m not going back with you.”

But the stairs were silent. 

And then there were more footsteps on the porch and more on the landing and then another on the stairs and Raven’s heart stilled in her chest. 

This wasn’t Zeke. 

The floor outside her door creaked and Raven rolled, not thinking, wincing as the metal of the flamethrower parts dug into her side. Better that than the bullets that splintered through her door. 

Raven pulled herself up behind the dresser, her hand closing around the rifle she’d leaned there after the previous day. These must be the men Niylah had warned her about. Now that she was counting footfalls, there were two on the landing, one on the stairs, and another two on her porch. She checked the chamber; the rifle had four rounds. 

The door knob rattled and Raven held her breath, then blew it out, slowly. Leveled the gun over her right knee, ignored her left, waited, pulse pounding in her ears. 

The door knob turned and Raven’s finger hesitated over the trigger.

Reapers were already dead; she’d never killed a human before.  

Then the door opened, and she fired, and then she had. 

Reloaded, fired again, missed; reloaded, fired, didn’t miss. He crumpled too.  

There was a shout from the stairs, and a clamber as the remaining three soldiers ran back onto the porch. Raven heard them calling to each other, heard them take up position outside her window, just before the glass of it exploded. 

She covered her head with her hands, pushing herself to her feet and over to the other side of the dresser. Felt around in the top drawer for a small cardboard box of bullets, remembered too late that it was downstairs, darted for the doorway. 

She gritted her teeth as she stepped over the two men fallen there, and her boots tracked blood down the stairs.  

The firing continued, and Raven winced as another window shattered. She crouched by the radio, opening the drawers as quietly as she could, feeling around for the cardboard box as she peaked through one of the broken windows to the front of the house. 

Three of them, like she’d guessed, in front of her house, guns pointed at her window. 

The box wasn’t there either, and Raven pulled back, mind racing. One bullet, three men. 

Her back was pressed against the thick logs of the cabin, and Raven slid down it to be low. They’d shot through the windows down here too, and she guessed they’d hear her through them. 

“The shed behind you is full of barely-refined hydrogen,” she yelled. “I’m not a great shot, but it wouldn’t take much to blow us all from here to North Dakota.”

The firing stopped. 

Raven let out a slow breath; smart men. 

“What do you want with me?” she called. “Who sent you?”

They were silent. 

Then there was a hissing, and a grunt like someone was had thrown something. Which, in fact, they had. 

A grenade flew through the window and Raven had time to push off the wall and sprint into the kitchen before it blew. Only it didn’t blow; it was gas. 

They were smoking her out. 

Just before the back door, Raven froze, remembering.

The bullets were above the refrigerator. 

She held her breath, turned back into the house. Her eyes were smarting from the smoke, but she felt above the high doors, hands closing around the cardboard box. Her eyes were streaming and her lungs were screaming; she was pretty sure she could feel the gas eating at her skin too, digging into the cuts the glass shards had torn in her. She stuffed it into her back pocket and burst out the back door. 

Their footsteps were loud as the soldiers ran around the house. 

Raven leaned against one of the pillars behind the house, trying to clear her head. The footsteps got louder and everything was still foggy from the gas, but she raised the gun. 

Fired when the first man rounded the corner. 

He crumpled; Raven could hear the other two men falling back against the house, waiting. She dug her hand into her pocket, hands shaking, the exposed skin tearing as the denim scraped against rough denim, and tried to disguise the fact that she felt like gasping for air. 

“I don’t want to kill you,” she called around the corner. Her fingers closed around another two bullets and she pulled them out, raising her voice to cover the sound of the chamber clicking opening. Her head was pounding and she shook her head slowly. It made it worse; darkness clouded the edge of her vision.

“Should’ve thought about that before Project 2086,” came the response.

Raven frowned; it wasn’t like she remembered the archiving numbers of everything she’d worked for NASA. She especially couldn’t remember it in her current state. 

“What does that even mean?” she yelled, trying to keep her voice steady. One of the bullets fell from her trembling fingers; she had to stop shaking like this. Her line of vision was narrowing even further, and she could hear her breath echoing like she was shouting.  

“It means,” and the voice was closer, calmer, and Raven looked up to see one of the men rounding the corner. She wasn’t ready, the gun wasn’t loaded, and his smug expression said he knew. “You can’t cross Cage Wallace and expect no consequences.”

That was a name she hadn’t heard in years. 

She resented that it might be the last she heard. 

The man raised his gun, c ocked back the safety. 

A shot echoed around the forest, then another.

But it was the soldiers who fell.

Raven’s eyes cracked open, hesitant. It still burned to breathe and her vision had gone from blurry, to foggy, to black and she was fighting to stay vertical. She didn’t know what they’d gassed her with, but it had to be a hallucinogenic. Because she hadn’t fired and the soldiers had somehow fallen. 

There was another footstep and Raven broke out of her haze. Slammed the chamber shut, propped herself up against the cabin, raised the rifle. Watched through the sights, waiting. 

Brown eyes. 

Brown eyes and broad shoulders, arms raised with an easy smile and the rifle lowered when Zeke came around the corner. 

It couldn’t be. Because he’d left and why would he come back and even if he’d heard the shots, why would he come towards the fire? Her mind was spinning and her world was spinning; it was everything Raven could do to keep herself from sliding down the cabin to the floor. 

Her eyes closed and she swallowed hard, counting her inhale as she tried to control her breathing. 

But when she opened her eyes, he was still there, closer now, concern clouding his features.

“Hey, hey, hey, Reyes,” he spoke quickly, crossing over to her. She might’ve felt the brush of a hand on her cheek but her skin was smarting from the gas and she could barely think straight, so she couldn’t be sure. 

“Colorado Springs is east,” she mumbled, “you couldn’t have gotten lost that quickly.”

“You really thought I’d keep going east when I heard the gunshots?”

She made herself look at him, held her eyes open and studied his face as he checked her for injuries. She was cut up from the glass and messed up from the gas, but nothing time wouldn’t fix. His eyes were dark, his jaw set, like he was angry at something and Raven couldn’t think of what she’d done wrong, but who else would he be mad at? 

He noticed her staring.

His hands fell to his side and his eyes met hers. She could see flecks of gold in the brown of his eyes, a scar above his eyebrow, long lashes. He had a cut along one of his cheekbones, not from a recent fight but probably just the open road, a shadow along his jawline. He took in a quick breath and his lips parted to say something, but the crackle of a radio interrupted them. 

“All units, come in.”

The call came from the radio strapped to the waist of one of the soldiers; Raven’s head snapped towards it. 

The message repeated. 

Ninety seconds. 

That’s how these things worked; they’d have 90 seconds to respond and if they couldn’t do that, the mission was as good as compromised. 

Which meant she and Zeke had about 80.

“Where’s your bike?” she asked, everything suddenly clear. She bent to pick up the rifle from where she’d dropped it, forced her fingers to load the chamber, clamped it shut again. 

“What do you—”

“Where is it?” she interrupted, pushing away from the cabin, refusing to stumble.

“Bottom of the hill,” Zeke answered, falling into step beside her, following her, “Other side of the fence.”

74 seconds. 

“Good.” Raven stopped on the porch, grabbed wire cutters from behind a wicker table. She turned, handing them to him, pointing. “Cut the tubes on the side of the shed and meet me there.”

“The tubes...the ones feeding hydrogen to the trip wires?”

“Yep,” she turned back to the house, “Hold your breath, okay?”

“Yeah, okay, but—”

“I’ll meet you there.”

Zeke watched for a moment, decided to trust her, and spun away from the cabin. Raven held her breath, clenched her eyes, and pushed in the door. 

The cabin was till foggy, but she had 55 seconds. 

She ran into the kitchen, grabbed a flannel off the back of one of the chairs there. Over to the cabinet, found a Cafe du Monde coffee tin at the back of the top shelves. It hadn’t held coffee for years.   

40 seconds. 

It felt weird, standing in the middle of a cabin, in the middle of the woods, in the middle of a war. The air still thick, with smoke and the scent of blood. 

There was a canvas bag by the door; she tossed the coffee tin into it, and the flannel. Checked for the lighter, still there, and a switch blade, also there. Sunglasses to protect against the wind. If she had more time, she’d grab more, but she was running out of air, say nothing of time. 

She shut the door. 

Ran down the mountain, jumping where she knew the wires were, the wires that had kept her safe and protected. She reached the bike at under the ten second mark, and there was a whine in the air. 

So her count was off. 

But she motioned for Zeke to start the bike and he did, not questioning when she crouched to the grass instead of following him immediately. She lit a couple of leaves and the blaze grew. It wouldn’t take long to make it up the mountain, up to the hydrogen. 

The whining was louder. 

She jumped on the bike behind Zeke, the canvas bag between their bodies, the flames climbing the mountain. 

“Go,” she said quietly. 

He did. 

The whining got louder, and so did the blaze, and as they spun down the mountain road, Raven heard a roar go up as the hydrogen ignited. Then the whine turned to a crack, and they looked up to see something streaking through the sky. 

Zeke leaned forward and the engine spat and they went faster. 

Then there was the sound of impact, of the missiles hitting the cabin. 

Raven let out a slow breath and her grip on Zeke’s waist loosened. 

So they’d bombed her home. 

But she’d blown it first.

It wasn't an actual victory, but it was the closest she could ask for in this day and age. 

They rounded another corner, racing down the mountain, away from the men on it that brought death and the fire that consumed them. The green of the trees and the gray of asphalt whipped by them, blurring. The wind was abrasive, but cooling, welcome. Raven closed her eyes, leaning her head forward. She felt Zeke straighten when she rested her head on the top of his shoulder, broadening his back. He still didn’t shield her from the wind, but Raven didn’t mind the sting of it. Nothing like a little pain to remind her she was still alive. 


End file.
